The Queue: Ugh, not another Bran chapter

Welcome back to The Queue, the daily Q&A column in which the WoW Insider team answers your questions about the World of Warcraft. Adam Holisky (@adamholisky) will be your host today.

My favorite chapters are the ones that say Tyrion on them. And I'm not really sure which Tyrion character is better, the one in the book or the one on TV. Pete (we're on a first name basis, even if he doesn't know it) portrays him better than almost any other actor I've seen in recent memory portray their character; and Tyrion in the book is just so wonderful dynamic, flawed, yet fundamentally good.

So really, I dislike Bran and Sansa chapters.

Chris asked:

What happened to all the bat/sky-screamer mounts that were supposed to be in in 5.2?

They never made it off the PTR.

That's relatively obvious. As for why exactly, we don't know -- maybe there was some problem with the model/clipping, maybe the way they were acquired wasn't working right, maybe Blizzard just wanted to hang onto them for a bit longer, maybe Ghostcrawler just decided to screw with dataminers.

Whatever the reason, this is a good opportunity to remind folks about the perils of datamining. It can fail to predict what's going to come up. If datamining were 100% accurate, we would have seen the emerald dream by now. The PTR, especially, should be considered a developer's playground, and little should be taken for fact.

Now of course a lot of the gear is different. When Wowhead or MMO-C datamines new gear lists you can safely assume that 90% of those things will drop, and that 95% (nowadays) of those items will have the same stats at release. It's the oddball items, the ones that stand out -- like triple spec -- which are prime candidates for cutting out of live.

Souvlaki asked:

Has the dev team ever stated a reason (apart for the obvious technical one) to not allow creating multiple arena teams of the same size? In past expansions I would run different comps by having multiple alts. In this expansion it seems the number of alts that are being levelled to cap has decreased (I have only leveled 2, whereas in cata I had 5). So the number of comps I can run (without dropping teams) is very limited.

It would be great if it were possible to have two (or more) arena teams of the same size so you could try more comps. Not having to depend on the same pair of friends to come online at the same time would be another advantage.

I'm not sure they've ever came out and said their reasoning to be honest (but they might have long ago and I'm not remembering). Nonetheless, I don't think it's a technical reason at all -- much more a gameplay one.

Your arena team is your team. It's the group that you're responsible for and to, the group that you're going to live and die with. Beaming down to the planet is always Spock, Kirck, McCoy, and some unfortunate Red Shirt. You don't see Nurse Chapel beam down with them, because they're a team. (Well okay, you nerds, there are others that beam down with them and survive, but really it's the three of them most of the time -- or at least a lot of the time. You know, maybe I just wanted to talk about Star Trek this morning. In the words of the Creative Director at Microsoft Studio #dealwithit, because apparently that's how you're supposed to talk to the people that pay your salary. Azeroth? Why on earth would I live there?)

Anyways, back on track... I think the reason is just that Blizzard wants you to form those tight bonds with the group of people you pick, and discourage (as they have open stated in the past on other issues) jumping around from team to team depending on who is playing the best in a particular week. You can already do that to some extent with the three different arena team levels, but still... more than that and it'd be very easy to game the system and eliminate the idea of a team.

NRD asked:

Any chance Ra'den will be available to LFR (or as a Scenario?) at a later stage once the 'hardcore' players done farming him?

I doubt it. There isn't any history of Blizzard making other rare bosses available, and while it's a neat idea, the exclusivity of it is something that's encouraging for some players to achieve a kill. A Ra'den kill is going to be super rare -- and while there are arguments for every player to be able to experience every bit of content, there's also compelling arguments that leaving some of that content exclusive creates a pretty good carrot on the stick.

And with that... I still want my carrot on the stick back.

I need to end this Queue before I get more off track... Anyone want to talk about my return to EVE Online?Have questions about the World of Warcraft? The WoW Insider crew is here with The Queue, our daily Q&A column. Leave your questions in the comments, and we'll do our best to answer 'em!